Milena Jelínek(1935-2020)

Milena Tobolova was born on August 19th, 1935 in Prestice, Czechoslovakia, a small town 70 miles southwest of Prague, her father was a sawmill owner. She transferred from studying languages to the FAMU Film and Television Academy where she was a pupil of novelist Milan Kundera in world literature.Her first script provoked the Communist authorities so much that she was expelled. But at the showing of that film in 1957 she was introduced by one of the directors then working in the industry, Milos Forman, to a computer engineer named Frederick Jelinek, who would help her leave the country for the States four years later.They married and she settled at first in Ithaca, New York, where her husband taught at Cornell University. When Forman was helping to create a graduate program in film at Columbia University in New York City, the couple would relocate once again, and she would begin teaching screenwriting and script analysis there in the 1980s.She was highly regarded by the students who learned from her expertise. She died from COVID-19 on April 15, 2020.